“Constraints make you interesting…By restricting and constraining things, you’d have to think differently. Necessity is the mother of invention.” Tobias Cornwell, Artistic Director of Get Out of My Space, has certainly taken this mantra to heart. From a production of Macbeth with a single light, to an outdoor immersive Antigone, Cornwell uses an inspiring blend of creativity and practicality to create interesting immersive and interactive work on a shoestring.
He joins us in the voidspace to talk about the struggles and triumphs of making immersive theatre from scratch, what training with Punchdrunk taught him about engaging an audience, and how to make magic out of a windswept night in Tunbridge Wells.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. To start off, tell me who you are and what you do in the world of interactive arts.
Tobias Cornwell:
My name’s Tobias Cornwell. I’m the Artistic Director of Get Out of My Space, and for the last year and a bit, I’ve also done work for companies like Punchdrunk. I do my best to create worlds for people to come and explore and enjoy themselves in, in a multitude of different ways. Whether that’s also trying to extend the idea of the senses through food as well, or whether it’s letting people fully explore and discover their own stories. I don’t like to put myself in one box. I just put my finger up and go “What do people want now?”, and try and do that, but always with an intention of some element of choice and bringing people into the present.
voidspace:
When you say about how you want to give your audiences choice, what are some of the ways in which you’ve done that in past productions?
Tobias Cornwell:
I’ve just finished a production of Antigone, and that was very kind of Punchdrunk in style. But rather than contemporary dance, I’d written a script. So it’s dialogue driven, but offering the audience choice. In the same way as when you enter a Punchdrunk show, the stories of the seven character in Antigone were completely overlapping, interlinking and spreading all across Thebes and the surrounding areas. The audience members could start wherever they wanted, and they could watch whatever they wanted. If they were watching a scene they weren’t that interested in, or heard something else that caught their attention, they could leave at any point. No one was telling them where to go, no one was telling them how to watch the show. It was all completely up to them.
On the other end of the spectrum, in 2021, I did a Christmas show called The Three Scrooges where three actors turned up and they all thought they’d been cast as Scrooge, and the audience got to vote each night as to which one actually got to play Scrooge, and then the other two had to fill in all the other roles, so that one was more of a collective choice.
voidspace:
What was the one involving food? That sounds interesting.
Tobias Cornwell:
I’ve done three or four now which have involved food. The Three Scrooges involved food: you had a three course Christmas dinner throughout the show. I’ve done A Midsummer Night’s Dream where you’re in this wooden treehouse, you started on the roof and you got given canapes and bubbles during the celebration of love. We gave the audience little bits of food throughout, finishing with strawberries and cream.
voidspace:
It’s a good way of involving those extra senses, isn’t it?
Tobias Cornwell:
With those dining experiences, you try to create the complete night out. When people go to the theatre, generally, they’re not just going to the theatre, they travel to one place and they get drinks, they travel to another and they get food, and then they go to the theatre, and they might have more drinks and then watch the show. I want to offer the complete package, so someone just has to buy one ticket and they know that they’re sorted for their pre-show drinks, their food, the production.
voidspace:
I’m interested in talking to you more about Antigone, which I know was your most recent production. You said that it had Punchdrunk influences. You also said that you’d spent some time working, I think, on [Punchdrunk’s 2022-23 production] The Burnt City. Is that right?
I’d be interested to know just what you’ve learned from that experience and how you’ve taken that influence on board, and how you’ve deviated from it.
Tobias Cornwell:
I’ve been fascinated with Punchdrunk since [2013-14 production] The Drowned Man. That completely blew my mind. After that closed, I was lucky enough to bag myself three weeks’ work experience on [Punchdrunk’s New York production] Sleep No More. As a fresh faced 18-year-old, I went out to New York and managed to do that before university, which was great. I managed to scoop up as much knowledge as I possibly could on how they build these shows. Then I went to Exeter University, which is where Felix [Punchdrunk’s Artistic Director] and Peter Higgin [Punchdrunk co-founder] and all these people were together, where Punchdrunk was born. Even though I went to Exeter around 20 years after Punchdrunk had started, it’s still all they talked about. You would, if that’s where it all started.
During university, Punchdrunk just kept on popping up. I was studying business, I wasn’t doing drama, but every time I went into the drama department, someone would be talking about Punchdrunk. And it made me think, how I’d loved doing bits on Sleep No More, and whether I could I try and do something myself. So, I did a couple of shows while down in Exeter, that were very influenced by Punchdrunk. I couldn’t dance, but I could do physical theatre, so it was all physical theatre, [physical theatre company] Frantic Assembly, all of that. It looped multiple times, and there were no words. I did that and I loved it.
When I finished university I thought that maybe I should do a show in my hometown. But, whether this is rude or not, I didn’t know whether my town would have liked a dancey thing. Tunbridge Wells, in Kent. I felt like some guy strolling up doing something which could arguably be inaccessible to some people. I remember taking a lot of people to The Drowned Man and it was like Marmite. People either absolutely loved it, like me, or they just didn’t get it, which is fine, that’s theatre. But I needed people to understand this, so I decided to write a script. And I found while writing it, that the looping structure then seemed to not work as well. Mainly because the beauty of Punchdrunk is that it’s like walking into a painting, you’re not going to be given the story. Just like when you’re walking around an art gallery, you’ve got to infer, and you can’t be wrong. When people are talking, it’s different. Once you’ve seen that scene, you’ve seen that scene. There’s not much beyond that now.
voidspace:
It doesn’t have the same scope for the difference in interpretation and symbolic level that Punchdrunk often runs on.
Tobias Cornwell:
Yeah, absolutely. Also, sometimes with Punchdrunk, you need to see the scene running from different angles to really capture it, whereas when there’s a spoken script, the understanding comes quite quickly, and that can work to your advantage and your disadvantage. It means the looping isn’t as necessary, but it means you can have longer shows, which people can follow. So rather than having three one-hour loops, I could have a two-hour show that ran once, and it meant that you could get more plot points within that.
From there, stuff started growing. I did an immersive version of Romeo and Juliet, and an immersive Hamlet during the COVID lockdowns, which was great fun.
voidspace:
How did that work during lockdown?
Tobias Cornwell:
It was during the tail end, so it was when the government in July 2020, I think, suddenly woke up one day and went, “You can do outdoor shows!” as if people don’t have to rehearse them. I thought, “well, this is a fun challenge!”, because thankfully, I was still on furlough. I had time. So, for 28 days I wrote, from 08:00 a.m. to 08:00 p.m. I just wrote, and it took me 28 days to write an immersive version of Hamlet. I got some friends together, sent out the script, and they learned the lines. I built the set in the woods. It was the first time I did a completely outdoor show. We were so lucky, because we were right next to this lake. So, when Ophelia drowned herself, you just saw this body disappear into this lake. And then the whole cast, we were on a hill, we all ran down this hill, dove into the lake, dragged this body out. It just all came together so perfectly.
I think that’s where Punchdrunk and I almost move away from each other. They are incredible. The stuff they make is just next level. For The Burnt City, there were just empty warehouses, and then Punchdrunk created these incredible sets. I don’t have the time, the money, the skill. So instead, I make work that responds to the natural environment around me. Outside, it’s there, it’s made for you. Beautiful.
voidspace:
Arguably, you can say that Punchdrunk started a similar level, but their work has become less site specific over the years, because they’ve been able to build their own sites. It sounds like what you’re doing is true site-specific theatre, because you’re responding to the environment that you’ve got, you don’t have a choice.
Tobias Cornwell:
I have a space, and then I have to write the show, because it’s not like a theatre show you just have a stage and an audience. I don’t know how it’s going to be, before I have the space.
voidspace:
I’m a big fan of practical constraints and creative constraints in the writing process, because I think often when you have those limitations, something better actually comes out of it.
Tobias Cornwell:
I’ve got a sticker on the back of my laptop that all the Antigone cast kept quoting back at me. It’s actually from a clothing brand. There’s this small clothing brand which called Painter, who are incredible. But the sticker just says, “Constraints make you interesting”. And I love it.
Whenever I’m feeling down that I don’t have the money that Punchdrunk have, or the time, or anything, they just say, “Well, constraints make you interesting”. And then I think “Yeah, we can do interesting stuff.” Frantic Assembly – who I’ve always loved – had a whole exercise where if you were stuck, if you were trying to devise something and it wasn’t quite working, they would take your arm and they’d tie it behind your back, and tell you to go do the same thing, but now with your arm behind your back. And suddenly everything would start to come together. By restricting and constraining things, you’d have to think differently. Necessity is the mother of invention.
voidspace:
When you did Antigone, were there any particular challenges or any particular necessities that shaped your creative process?
Tobias Cornwell:
It’s not the first time I’ve done a show on the site that I did Antigone. The first show I did down there was Macbeth. It’s a beautiful setting, it’s wonderful. It’s called Kingdom and it’s in Pennhurst, just outside of Wells. It has a beautiful treehouse, which is where I did A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But down the track, about a kilometre down, it’s just a bit of a weird wood. There’s an open bit, but it’s circular and every time I go down, I think I just have to do a play here.
voidspace:
You have me at “weird wood”, to be honest.
Tobias Cornwell:
There you go. Brilliant. But you are a kilometre away from any power. There’s no power. There’s nothing. When I did Macbeth down there, I managed to get myself a generator, which I could run the speaker system off, and one light. And my lighting designer was like, “OK, you’ve got one light, what are you going to do?” I said, “We’re going to point it at the woods”. And he goes, “But the action’s over there [points the other way], the only thing you’re lighting is the woods??” I was like, “Well, the only way I can think of showing the woods marching toward Macbeth is if we suddenly reveal them”. And so, I did it in the round, and I gave all the audience torches. The audience lit the show every night and the show was fantastic.
voidspace:
That’s a great little conceit to stumble on just out of, as you say, out of necessity.
Tobias Cornwell:
I literally didn’t have the power to put any lights down here. So, rather than just boringly light the stage and that be that, I just thought, “How would someone who’s just decided to come watch Macbeth light it?” That was the first time they’ve ever been given the option.
voidspace:
Were there any trends, in terms of what people went for?
Tobias Cornwell:
Generally, everyone would light what’s in front of them. When people tracked, the whole place would move with it. I wish I had an option to direct it again, because I’d leave dead spots on the stage, where you could sneak someone in and then all the lights would snap back to it. There were trends, but also every night was completely different.
The beauty was, it wasn’t just dependent on the individual, but the collective as well. Because on a Tuesday night, if there were 18 people in the audience, it became a darker show than a Saturday night, where there were 65.
voidspace:
Did that change the energy for the performances as well?
Tobias Cornwell:
Absolutely. The actors were just like, “We’ve got no idea what we’re walking into”. That is almost my favourite thing that performers say, because it means that they’re alive, they’re present, they don’t know what’s coming. It was like that in The Three Scrooges. They’d be like, “We have to start this show and we don’t know what role we’re playing!”
You kind of get it with improv, and stuff like that, but there’s something about having learnt a script and physically starting the show, going “I don’t know if I’m going to be Bob Cratchit, or Scrooge, or Isabel tonight”. It just completely changes. That’s what gives me so much energy.
So then, when deciding to do Antigone in the same place, the idea of using torches again did cross my mind. I realised that then that unfortunately that would become very dangerous, because there would be some scenes without any light, and the performers do need to move around.
I found these battery powered lights, and it meant I had to take the whole set down and put the whole set back up every night, to charge them, but it was incredible. The learning curve was huge, because now I feel like you could put me anywhere, absolutely anywhere, and now I know how to light a show, if I had no power, and it worked. It was a huge step up for me, because we had complicated lighting cues within these shows that just hadn’t happened before, because we didn’t have the technology. But the technology has moved on so far that it meant it’s trickled down to people like me, where I’m like, “Great! I can afford this now.” The stuff that’s coming out at this kind of level is going to be huge, because stuff is starting to become affordable.
It’s all about what you do with the kit. It’s stuff that is generally used for sporting events, because it’s waterproof, it’s battery powered, but people don’t really use it that much in the arts. It’s just stealing little bits from everywhere because you have to.
voidspace:
I like that idea of having to be a bit of a magpie. What was the experience of plotting out Antigone like? I imagine trying to run a branching narrative but in an outdoor space would be a lot harder to orchestrate than if you were doing that in a more controlled environment. For example, it must be harder to create a consistent soundscape to run everything to.
Tobias Cornwell:
Absolutely. When the wind is blowing and you can see your speaker moving back and forth on the pole that it’s on, and you can see the aux cable wobbling with it, and you’re thinking, “All the actors are reliant on that!”, you start to get a bit nervous. There was one night where – I cannot, for the life of you, tell you why. It was something to do with the rain, it was absolutely soaking – one of the speakers had cut out, and if I just held the wire, it worked. So that was my job for the evening. I was just holding that wire and for some reason, to do with the current or the water, that worked.
But the same principles absolutely apply, everything that I learned. I still remember it on Sleep No More. That’s where I really learned how the music controlled the shows, where I remember so clearly walking down this corridor and with the sound guy, and he said, “Take a step right”. And as you did, you started to hear what was going on down that corridor, so you wanted to go. Then he said “Right, take a step left”. And again, you heard what was going down to your left, and the sound zones were perfect. So that whatever decision you made, it then felt like you made the right choice. Sound zones have just fascinated me since. I’ve never, ever managed to recreate what that corridor did. But it’s always an objective of mine.
So, the principles are exactly the same, whether you’re doing it indoors or outdoors. It’s all music led. And as much as the actors hated me constantly drilling it into them, I’ll be like, “That’s a lovely scene, but you’re 30 seconds late, so I don’t care.” Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart. It’s amazing to see, one by one, throughout the rehearsal process. Some during the show, you see it click and they go. “That’s why it’s so important!” realising that there’s so much else going on.
We know we have to run it through music. So, what does being outdoors mean? It means mounting the speakers. It means they’ve got to be waterproof.
voidspace:
Is sound bleed between zones an issue, when you’re making a music-led show outdoors?
Tobias Cornwell:
There’s going to be sound bleed. You’ve got to roll with that. The instinct is to lower the volume, so that the sound doesn’t go as far. But actually, I found sometimes that raising it meant that where you were was loud enough that you didn’t hear what was outside. Punchdrunk do that. They like to push the sound, because they have no dialogue. But then, I need to find a balance. People need to speak, and you don’t want them in a nice, close, intimate scene to be screaming at each other, or if they’re telling each other secrets that someone just over the way can’t hear, they can’t be shouting. So, it’s give and take and it was far from perfect for Antigone, but it did work. I think if you can really get people’s attention, they roll with it and they don’t always notice what you notice. I’m noticing that you’re hearing three different things, but they might think that’s just part of show and start to infer their own things from it.
I think a lot of the time people hold themselves back because it’s not perfect when actually you’ve just got to do it and you’ve got to do it and it’s not going to be perfect because nothing’s perfect. But as long as you learn and improve for next time, then it’s great.
voidspace:
Do you have one-on-one type scenes in your work, or is it a lot more the kind of public stuff that you’re trying to orchestrate?
Tobias Cornwell:
One-on-ones are magic, but they’re also a pain in the ass.
They’re the Holy Grail. They’re the most beautiful thing. But also, there have to be so many health and safety procedures around them. There are a lot of tech elements as well that go into them. The beauty of the one-on-ones is that they seem so seamless, but they are far from it. And the main thing for me is making sure that audience, performers, everyone is safe, and I can’t quite achieve that just yet.
If I were to lock people away, it also stops people from getting the complete journey. We have little moments, where actors will offer a hand and they’ll say a speech to one person, but anyone else can also listen in.
What I find really fascinating – and I don’t know whether this is because I’m doing it outside of London – but I’d go as high as 90% of the time that people who are on the receiving end of that offer-the-hand moment, they walk away.
People don’t want it. They’ll get as close to the action and as close to the actors as anyone else. You’ll be shoulder to shoulder with them. Then the actor puts their hand out, and we literally had someone say, “No, f- that”, and run away. I’m as shocked as you are.
voidspace:
We live in a world where one-on-ones are absolutely things that people would – sometimes quite literally – trample each other for.
How did the performers who were new to that kind of work, find that closeness?
Tobias Cornwell:
The way I introduce it to people is that it’s like screen acting, but you’ve just got a load of different cameras on you. Performers want to project more at first. So, if we’re having a conversation, they want to throw their shoulder back and play it to an audience over there. And I’d be like, “There’s no audience over there.” You just have to teach them that if you’re having a conversation with someone, be square with them and have that conversation, like you would in real life. It’s undoing a lot of things that they’ve been taught at drama school, which was quite fascinating. Theatre is so dialogue driven that you’ll find that there’s not much space between the lines. I was told, “clip your cues and have your thought on the line”. Whereas when you look at film, there’s so much space between the lines, because you can look at all the details. So, I would always tell them to slow down and to think before they speak. It’s that thought process that was the hardest thing for them.
voidspace:
I’ve noticed that the best, in my opinion, Punchdrunk performers have that sense of stillness and that sense of less is more. That sense of having to kind of tone everything down by three notches over what you think of doing if you’re on a regular stage.
Tobias Cornwell:
Yeah. Because you’re used to someone being sat 500 rows back, but they’re not. They’re not even 500 steps back. They’re an arm’s length away. It’s also instilling confidence in the performers that the mundane can become fascinating, if it’s got to do with the story. I put a lot of weight, in my version of Antigone, on obols, which are the coins that people have when they die, that they take to pay the ferryman to get across the Styx. It just made the story simpler, because Creon refused to give Antigone’s brother an obol. The performer who played Creon, at one point, was just fiddling with this coin. He just had time to kill before someone came in. It was 10 seconds, and he just picked up this coin and looked at it. Then for the rest of the play, he basically goes around collecting characters’ obols to make them follow him.
He just held this coin, and he just looked at it and then put it back. And I said, “That was the most beautiful thing you did that whole night”, because it was so simple and potentially mundane. He just picked up a coin and looked at it. But because we could get so close, and then because we saw what he did afterwards, it informed everything. It was just wonderful. But you can’t do that on stage because no one’s going to see a coin that’s no bigger than a two pence piece. If you pick it up and look at it, really, it’s just going to disappear.
So, a lot of my direction isn’t direction at all. It’s keeping people on time and giving them the confidence to know that less is more and just be as natural as they can. Some people are so natural at it, they just flow in, and other people really struggle at first because it does go against everything they’ve been taught. A lot of people I work with just come out of drama school, and they have to unlearn it all again, but they all get it in the end, and they all absolutely love it.
Part of that is because they’re outdoors as well. If you’re on stage and you’re pretending you’re in the rain, it’s a bit rubbish. But if you’re outdoors in the rain and you’re not pretending, its brilliant. Some performers were a bit hesitant, saying it just felt a bit overdramatic. There’s that bit in Bad Boys 2 where the main character’s in the rain and he’s shooting into the sky, screaming. And I’m like, “If it’s raining and you’ve got that moment, everyone in the audience wants you to do that because they want to be doing it, you have that option. Scream into the heavens with the rain. Enjoy it. You’ve got twelve performances of this, so make the most of every single one.” Once they got that, they got that confidence. I know that screaming is the rain just went against everything I just said, about the holding it back and being subtle.
voidspace:
It’s an arc, isn’t it? I mean, if you have your quiet beat, then you’ve also got a bit of space to work it up. As well. Whereas if you start at ten, the only place you got to go is eleven.
Tobias Cornwell:
Exactly. But for Creon, when his wife’s just killed herself in front of him, he can hold her and scream into the heavens. That works. That’s great. I think there’s this idea of being able to be natural, being able to just live in this space, be able to tell your story complete from beginning to end, and not having to pretend to be anywhere but where you are. You’re outdoors. You’re in the rain. And after a bit of easing into it, the performers absolutely love it.
voidspace:
Incredible. You were saying before about when we were talking about one-on-ones, about safety, and I was thinking, that that’s got to be a tricky thing, especially when you might have performers wandering off into the dark. You don’t know how many people are going to be following them. How do you keep track of all that stuff and keep everyone safe?
Tobias Cornwell:
I have stewards who are there to help people, and make sure everyone’s okay. Generally, the whole space where everyone can go, whether it’s a designated performance space where I expect people to go or not, if it’s somewhere where I think people could potentially wander off, I make sure it’s safe. Nothing can hurt people, unless I’ve wrapped it in hazard tape. It’s kind of on them if they go through hazard tape.
What’s really funny is, I had some colleagues from Punchdrunk come down and watch Antigone, and the first thing they did was wander somewhere I thought no one would ever go, straight into the pitch black. They said, “when we realised we couldn’t see our hands in front of our face, we realised we’d gone wrong”. I said, “No one else. No one else in the entire run has done this!” After that, I had to put a new warning in my welcoming speech: stay where there’s light. The show is where there’s light. If it’s dark, nothing’s happening there.
voidspace:
A very Punchdrunk instinct, isn’t it, to pitch off into the darkness?
Tobias Cornwell:
I asked whether, after five or ten metres, did they not think, maybe that they’d gone wrong? And they said “Yeah. When we saw your car that had been parked in the woods, we realised.”
voidspace:
What would you say on your journey so far as a company, is the thing that you’re proudest of?
Tobias Cornwell:
I think the way we’ve managed to constantly reinvent what we do, resist being put into a box. In fact, one of my proudest moments was when I was just walking through the woods one day, and someone recognised me and stopped me and they said, the favourite thing aboutGet Out of my Space is the fact that they’ll buy a ticket, and they’ll have no clue what it’s going to be. They just know it’s going to be great. They could be on their feet for 2 hours, they could be sitting down having a meal. But they trust the quality. It might seem such a small thing from people, but I’m not a very emotional person. I don’t ever cry or anything like that. The only time I do will be from an email that I’ve got from an audience member who’s come to watch one of my shows. That’s it. I think people underestimate the power of that, when someone’s taken the time out of their day to email me to say how much they enjoyed a show. I remember sitting in a car park waiting to pick up an actor, and someone emailed me about Antigone, saying “I’ve taught classics for 40 years. I’ve seen countless productions, but yours was the most enjoyable and most innovative I’ve ever seen”. I think that was after the second show, and I felt in that moment that we could close the show there and then and I’d be happy.
voidspace:
It’s always so important, that feedback. I know that as a writer, and a lot of the people reading my magazine are also writers, grassroots creators. Sometimes you plug away at whatever it is that you’re doing and you just don’t know whether anyone cares, really, do you? Sometimes it’s nice to have that proof.
Tobias Cornwell:
100%. And I lose faith in my writing all the time. I think no one’s going to enjoy this. I get too lost in it and I start to think it’s not good anymore. But then at every stage, I fall back in love with it. When the actors come in, and they start saying the lines and I realise, “Oh! That is not how I wrote it at all. But that is far better.” They’re saying the words I wrote, but not in the way that I had it in my head. I always say, I think when I hand them the script, it’s a fully finished painting. Then they start performing it and I realised that it had all been in black and white, and now it’s all coming alive. I think it’s really good. Art needs to be shared with people for it to really be enjoyed.
voidpsace:
What advice would you have for aspiring creators out there?
My advice for aspiring creators would be to just go for it. Whatever your passion, whatever that thought in your head is right now, just take that first step to achieving it. Everyone and everything starts small but the important thing is that they start. Constraints make you interesting and you’ll have a lot to begin with, which means you’ll be very interesting. Find the beauty in that, celebrate it and take the plunge. The water is fine once you’re in!
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